Sunday, April 29, 2012

The grand
finale of this A to Z Blog Challenge tour should end with a huge number, but
instead it ends with the least number, zero. It could be Zero Cemetery Lane (A Cricket Sawyer paranormal Romantic Suspense)

All of these
novels have one thing in common, the mystery element. Zero itself is a
mysterious number, it holds the place of miniscule amounts or unfathomable mega
amounts.

The
strangeness of the address number, Zero Cemetery Lane, is no accident. It is a
real address in a tiny burg in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The address itself
led to the creation of the mystery based on a piece of real estate not far from
that address. Ask yourself who would feel safe having their address zero—no
one—nothing could exist at zero—but it did— and the cemetery was close at hand with
room for more to be planted.

Then
whatever possessed a mystery novelist to name a character Zip, the character
himself. Once profiled, an active African American teenager preferred the nick
name to the moniker Ziegfeld. His nickname fit because of his restless, hurried
manner of zipping from this to that and here to there. ADD, no, just super
hyper activity of a busy mind and a need to move and the circumstances that wouldn't allow him the peace of home and mind.

All three
novels play with Z. It may be the last letter of the alphabet, but when you are
always last you try harder. And Z seriously delivers for a mystery suspense
author.

P.S. Sign up for
The Mystery Readers Connectiontoday and get the free short short story
"Black Roses." Recommend a friend sign up and when they do you will
receive a copy of the short short "The Hanging Tree."

Hurry sign up today you don't want to miss a
single fact, and entertainment packed issue of The Mystery Readers Connection.
Once a month, in your in box, several columnists, several new (to you) authors
join us to present their unique look at mystery and story.

There is a safe
unsubscribe link in every newsletter so you never have to stay (though we hope
you will) if you don't want to. Hurry – get your name in quickly! You won't
want to miss a single episode.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Yesterday is
a fascinating term, especially, when surrounded by yellow crime scene tape as
it is fairly often, if not always, in a mystery.

Yellow
itself is a fascinating word for a mystery writer. Yellow, cowardly, yellow
skin, yellow scrapes along the concrete where a body was found, was it perhaps,
dragged, heels leaving their marks along the way. The Yellow Wallpaper, that
story haunts me. I wish I had written it. Was the woman being slowly poisoned
by her husband as she hallucinated about the people living in the wall paper? I
have a lime green and yellow patterned wallpaper and matching paneling in my
bedroom—this story frightens and engages my mystery inclined mind.

Faith
Yachne, a religious zealot in The Pink Lady Slipper is a different shade of
yellow. She hides behind a skewed vision of herself as prophetess and
evangelist, but her real missionmight
be to save herself from her abusive mind-controlling preacher, husband.

Don't
discount yellow, its muse food, just as a yellow legal pad creates the
landscape of a novel that, the blank white page or computer screen cannot, for
me and my pen and many other writers I know of.

Yellow is all sorts of things.

Dandelion
yellow became "Dandelion With Angel Wings" my very first published
story. Published in Thema Magazine in 2000. It is a story about cancer survival
and a daughter born against all odds, with the tenacity of a dandelion and the
beauty of an angel.

Engage your mind in color, technicolor - vivid as the scene you see in your mind and your readers will follow to see what new color you see. Is it new, or is it a clue. That's up to you. But Yellow is certainly a good place to start. Yellow sky means strong winds - April Shauers was warned about the tornado before it trapped her, she just didn't listen she was tracking a serial killer in my book Tracker.

P.S. Sign up for
The Mystery Readers Connectiontoday and get your copy of
"Black Roses." Recommend a friend sign up and when they do you will
receive a copy of the mini-mystery "The Hanging Tree."Hurry sign up today you don't want to miss a
single fact, and entertainment packed issue of The Mystery Readers Connection.

Once a month, in your in box, several columnists, several new (to you) authors
join us to present their unique look at mystery and story. There is a safe
unsubscribe link in every newsletter so you never have to stay (though we hope
you will) if you don't want to. Hurry – get your name in quickly! You won't
want to miss a single fun filled issue.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Skull Music, the mystery suspense novel began as a writing prompt including
an x-ray of a skull, a tape cassette with a weird sound, and a dolphin. The
x-ray became the key that unlocked the story for me…I have no idea how I found
or concocted the xeno-transplant lab.

Any word could be a trigger. Who would think a xylophone might be? Orchestrated
Murders, [A Works In Progress] a whole, life-sized orchestra suspended
from a real museum ceiling with life sized mannequins—or are they mannequins?
The sight sparked an amazing story for me that is still unraveling.

An old Piano, an even older theatre, a piano man and his cast came from a
man's face in a piece of wood-grain wall paneling where I lived one cold lonely
winter, his image haunted me until he became a character in Ghost Music of Vaudevilleand I changed his name to Piano Man.

Give me a word or three and I'll give you a mystery, because that is what I
do, that is my livelihood and my life.

My mother's penchant for a quote or saying to fit every occasion created
many stories for me. When she told me her grandfather, who I never knew, always
began his story telling with "Back when Tag was a pup and turkeys chewed
tobacco..." That became the thread that created Watch ForThe Raven in a
practically non-stop writing marathon.
She died before I got it finished. Matter of fact she died before I finished
any of my thirty some books, having never read a one or even knowing I was
writing for publication.

If you want to be a writer watch for a phrase, a word, a picture that
strikes a note. Jot it down and at your next opportunity examine it with x-ray
vision. What can it say to you? Write that story, write it now!

Read with a writer's eye. Take that first sentence, make it yours and write
its story. X-ray, Xylophone, Zanadu.

P.S. Sign up for The Mystery Readers
Connectiontoday and get the free flash fiction story "Black
Roses."
Recommend a friend sign up and when they do you will receive a copy of the
flash fiction mystery "The Hanging Tree."
Hurry sign up today you don't want to miss a single fact, and entertainment
packed issue of The Mystery Readers Connection. Once
a month, in your in box, several columnists, several new (to you) authors join
us to present their unique look at mystery and story.
There is a safe unsubscribe link in every newsletter so you never have to
stay (though we hope you will) if you don't want to. Hurry – get your
name in quickly! You won't want to miss a single issue.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

A way-out is
crucial for your sleuth, and at times it will seem the antagonist whodunit,
will be the only lucky one—the antagonist is always the one with a way-out, always-- until the end that
is.

When you are
writing a mystery, your sleuth must always have a way out. Even when he doesn't
know whodunit, and the future looks its bleakest—that is when your protagonist
will shine and her true strengths will come through.

As a writer
of any genre when the dreaded writers block threatens you – you could crack
open a copy of Writing Wide, or Writing Wider to find writing prompts,
writing tips, writing exercises and a way out. You are the protagonist of all
you write. The forward thinking answer to the way out. Whodunit? Yoududnit,
when you hear a reader rave (not to be confused with Watch For The Raven) about your latest creation.

Pick up that
pen writer soldier. March to the front line, and write like the wind in
whatever strength and direction it blows you.

Sure paint yourself (your protagonist) into a corner but always have a target so you know instinctively where to find the way out. Good Luck!

P.S. Sign up for
The Mystery Readers Connection today and get your copy of the story
"Black Roses." Recommend a friend sign up and when they do you will
receive a copy of the flash fiction mystery "The Hanging Tree."The next issue is due out April 26, 2012 - that's today = )

Hurry sign up today you don't want to miss a
single fact, and entertainment packed issue of The Mystery Readers Connection.
Once a month, in your in box, several columnists, several new (to you) authors
join us to present their unique look at mystery and story. There is a safe
unsubscribe link in every newsletter so you never have to stay (though we hope
you will) if you don't want to. Hurry – get your name in quickly! You won't
want to miss a single issue.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Villains
come in all shapes and sizes.They wear
many hats and not necessarily always the black hat of the days when villains
dressed in black and good guys dressed in white. Their motives for their
vicious treachery are often as varied as the characters possibilities would
suggest.

Sometimes in
an inanimate object, a string of beads, the power stones of the goddess Ebony, as
in Diamonds, Death and Deceit, become
the villain with accomplices.

Sometimes a
vegetable (poisoned by accidental bad zucchini or mushrooms) turns deadly at
the hands of a caterer or an act of Mother Nature. Capricorn Goat, a catered meal turns deadly. Did Echo Folio, the
caterer) poison her ex-boyfriend and his fiancé at their engagement dinner?
(But there's more – you can find out on the contest page for this mystery
novel.) Food propels the means, method and motive for many a genre.

A simple
meal will never again look the same once visited by a mystery author's romantic
suspense in Valentine Express. A
railroad engineer and a bubbling brew of spaghetti sauce provide the milieu of
another Cricket Sawyer bit of short fiction.

P.S. Sign up for
The Mystery Readers Connectiontoday and get the free flash fiction story
"Black Roses." Recommend a friend sign up and when they do you will
receive a copy of the flash fiction mystery "The Hanging Tree."

Hurry sign up today you don't want to miss a
single fact, and entertainment packed issue of The Mystery Readers Connection.
Once a month, in your in box, several columnists, several new (to you) authors
join us to present their unique look at mystery and story. There is a safe
unsubscribe link in every newsletter so you never have to stay (though we hope
you will) if you don't want to. Hurry – get your name in quickly! You won't
want to miss a single issue.